Are we building ourselves a digital prison?

Digitalisation obviously has its benefits but it also has a dark potential which needs more open discussion

Could we be under sentence to a ‘digital prison’ where every aspect of our lives — and I mean every aspect — would be monitored and managed with Orwellian alacrity and rigour?

It must be recognised that, with disturbing signs of a new kind of technocratic totalitarianism on the rise, uses of digitalisation are capable of undermining human rights and democratic systems, of assisting collectivism over our accustomed individualism, of mounting, no less, an attack on the soul.

As the Belgian professor of psychology Mattias Desmet says: ‘Totalitarianism and technocracy like to present themselves as the pinnacle of rationality and science.’ (The Psychology of Totalitarianism, 2022).

Warnings must be given more widely about the potential for increased digitalised surveillance, tracking and control by centralised government and bureaucracy, and for power to fall into ever fewer hands; about the increase in intrusive actions by security agencies, pressure on the right to privacy, increased censorship and curbs on free speech with suppression of views alternative to that of the establishment.

Universal digitalisation — particularly of currency, IDs, face recognition and…